NEUROLOGIST-ESSAYIST OLIVER SACKS IS A MASTER AT BLENDING SCIENCE WITH OLD-FASHIONED STORYTELLING

The doctor is in. it took more than 20 years, but after six successful books and numerous articles by and about him, neurologist Oliver Sacks, 61, has arrived (all 210 burly pounds of him) as the latest two-cultures hero, a man of science as well as a man of letters. W.H. Auden detected the budding synthesis in Sacks' work in the early 1970s, when he declared Sacks' book Awakenings a masterpiece of medical literature. Hollywood grasped this high concept two decades later. Awakenings, the movie, starred Robin Williams as the dedicated doctor and Robert DeNiro as a patient temporarily freed from...